


Everything Is Different

by cgf_kat



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Gen, Hospital, Hurt Lance (Voltron), Lance & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Lance (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Minor Character Death, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Post Season 7, Recovery, Season 7 Spoilers, plangst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 16:23:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15666864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cgf_kat/pseuds/cgf_kat
Summary: “Lance…?”His shoulders stiffen at her voice, and she knows he’s trying to stop crying. The sniffing and temporarily held breaths are a giveaway.“I’m...I’m fine…”Pidge sighs. “No, you’re not.”** Earth is safe, and the Paladins are recovering. Now, finally, there's time to process what they've been through, and what's happened to their planet. Pidge comforts Lance late one night in the Garrison hospital.**





	Everything Is Different

**Author's Note:**

> So I didn't see Lance's grandparents anywhere (the ones from the picture in his head in season one). Yeah. Nowhere. But everyone else from that image was there. OOF. And I also needed some Plance. Or rather, Plangst, as it turned out...

The silence of the Garrison hospital’s night is broken by a scream - the unmistakable sound of someone woken from the kind of nightmare no one would ever wish on anyone else. 

The sound yanks Pidge from her own uneasy sleep, sending a shiver down her spine that’s only made worse by the fact that she’s alone in here. Visiting hours long since over, her usually-crowded room is achingly empty. 

She sits straight up when she processes the sound that woke her. 

Lance. She would know that voice anywhere. 

When she clamors from her bed and out into the hallway, she isn’t alone. Hunk is already hovering outside his door to her left, and across the way Allura’s door is just sliding open. They look at each other, but they don’t have time to say anything before banging sounds from behind the door beside Allura’s send all of their eyebrows up. 

Another moment, and that door opens too. Keith stumbles out, using the doorway for support. There are still bandages around his head, whereas Hunk’s bandages disappeared a day or two ago.

“Quiznak, Keith,” Pidge scolds quietly. “You shouldn’t be up.”

“I’m fine,” he insists. “Lance…”

“I’ve got it. Allura, can you get him back in bed?”

Keith is starting to slide down the doorway, probably very much against his will. His face is already scrunching in frustration when Allura catches him and urges him back into his room. 

Pidge lets out a breath when the door closes behind them, and glances at Hunk. “You should rest too, okay?” He may not be as bad off as Keith still seems to be, but he looks so tired just standing there.

“Okay...just...call me if Lance needs me, okay? Promise.”

“I promise.” She hugs him before shooing him back into his room. 

She pauses outside Lance’s door to take a breath. She can already hear the soft sounds of crying from the other side, and when she goes in he’s curled on his side, facing away from her. She should have expected that. 

“Lance…?”

His shoulders stiffen at her voice, and she knows he’s trying to stop crying. The sniffing and temporarily held breaths are a giveaway. 

“I’m...I’m fine…”

Pidge sighs. “No, you’re not.”

He doesn’t move when she sits on the edge of his bed, and she lets her eyes scan his hospital room for a moment. The window sill bench and nearly every other chair or piece of furniture in the room is covered in jackets and snack packages and magazines, coloring books and water bottles...all the things his family leaves behind every night when they have to be all but forced out by the nurses. 

There are things that aren’t hers in Pidge’s room, too, but not nearly as much scattered paraphernalia as this. She sees his large family coming and going, every day, and she almost wonders how the room isn’t even more cluttered.

Still...there are at least one or two members of Lance’s family that she hasn’t seen. Not even when they were back at the Garrison. And she hasn’t asked. She’s pretty sure none of the others have, either.

They were in the middle of a war. There wasn’t time. And now...now she just doesn’t want to make it worse. 

“It’s okay, Lance,” she whispers. To be sad. To cry. He’s still trying to stop. 

When he doesn’t answer Pidge gets up on her knees on the bed so it’s easier to flop over him - to roll and land on the other side of his curled body. 

“Ow! Pidge, what are you - I’ve still got bruises everywhere!”

“We’ve all got bruises everywhere.” Her side and one of her arms are twinging at her even now, and her joints still ache, but the surprised look on Lance’s face that’s starting to chase away the tears is worth it. Crying is okay, but helping is good too.

“What are you doing?” he mumbles, swiping at his cheeks. 

“Being here. They put our rooms all next to each other for a reason, you know.”

Lance lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. It’s something. “I just...it was just a bad dream.”

Pidge lets her head rest on the pillow beside his, and raises an eyebrow at him. “It was about something, though. I mean you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to but...you can.”

He doesn’t answer at first. He lies there beside her, his arms still wrapped tightly around himself, and she’s ready to just lie there with him in the silence so he isn’t alone. 

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” he whispers finally.

“What do you mean?” She has an idea. But maybe he needs to say it. All of it. 

She isn’t sure how many times she’s already cried, herself. Mostly all over her mom, and Matt since he got here. She cried when she saw Matt, the first time. He’d changed again. She’d known he would have aged those three years or more that the rest of them didn’t, but it was still a shock to see it. It was worse than the first time she’d found him again. 

“I...I don’t know. It’s just...I-I’ll think about...about how much of my family’s lives I missed, or how much they went through being stuck on a Galra-occupied planet for three years, o-or how many times we’ve almost died, or…” He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “Somehow the nightmares are just kinda all of it.”

“I know…”

“And-and I don’t wanna do this during the day when they’re all here.” He motions vaguely at the room around him, where his family will crowd in again in the morning. “They’ve been through enough! They need...they need me to be strong, you know? Especially the kids. I just…”

Pidge blinks. That part she wasn’t expecting. “Lance…” She’s reaching for his now-flailing hands before she can really think about it, clasping them tightly when she catches them. “Lance, what are you talking about?”

When they first got back she was so focused on her parents, crying into her mother’s shoulder, but thinking back...Lance didn’t cry. Not really. Not even then. A few tears, maybe, and then they were gone and he was smiling and that’s all she’s seen from him since, around his family. Loving them. Happy to be with them again. 

“They don’t need me bringing it all up again, Pidge. How...how hard it was. And…” His breath hitches. “A-and my grandparents. And—” His throat seems to close off. 

Pidge swallows. Well if he was going to bring it up anyway…

“Have they told you what happened?” she asks quietly.

He shakes his head and sobs once. “I-I tried to ask and they just looked sad. I can’t...do that to them. I can’t—”

“You shouldn’t be afraid to talk to your family, Lance. You don’t have to be strong for them ALL the time. That’s why you have each other in the first place. I thought you’d be the one who’d be an expert at this...you’re so much better at dealing with people than I am…”

“But it’s different now, Pidge. I’m a paladin of Voltron it’s...different. Aren’t I supposed to be—”

“Human? Yourself?”

“You know what I mean,” he sighs, making a face at the bedsheets.

“I know what you mean, but what you mean is stupid.”

Lance pulls his hands free of hers and sits up slowly, scrubbing at his face again. “Pidge, come on…”

She sits up beside him, but he’s already talking again before she can answer. 

“What do you want me to tell them? That I haven’t gone a night without crying since we got back to Earth? They don’t need to know that! I’m supposed to be glad to be home. I AM glad to be home; i-it shouldn’t matter that it’s not the home I remember. My family is here...most of them.”

His fingers twist in the blankets over his legs. “And I’m...I’m not the only one who’s lost people. Everyone has. Everything is different now.” His eyes close, and she doesn’t think he’s really trying to answer her anymore. Fresh tears slip from the corners of his eyes. “Everything is different now…”

Pidge rubs at his back gently. “It’s okay to be upset about that.”

Lance sobs again, and this time it doesn’t sound like he’s fighting it so hard. “I don’t even know if the farm is in one piece. Nothing here looks the same anymore...who knows what Varadero Beach looks like. And I’ll...I’ll n-never see my grandparents again...never taste my grandmother’s cooking...we’ll never all be together again…”

“I’m so sorry, Lance.” She latches the arm she’d been rubbing his back with around his shoulders, and rests a cheek on his arm. “I know everything’s changed...but you don’t have to go through dealing with it alone, okay?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he cries. “When will I not feel like this?”

Pidge swallows again, because her own throat is getting tight now. “I don’t know. Stuff takes time, you know?”

“I just...keep doing this…”

“You can cry about something as many time as you need to, Lance. Nobody said you could only cry about something once. That’s not how healing works. I-It’s not like a neat little...straight line. That’d be nice…I’m sorry if I suck at this.”

Lance doubles over, a strained laugh mixing with his sobs for a moment. “You’re fine.”

Then he’s just crying, harder than before too, she thinks, but maybe that’s good right now. Maybe that means he listened. 

Pidge wraps both arms around him and holds on tight, because that’s all she can do. But it certainly isn’t nothing. And when she cries herself, Lance shifts enough to hold onto her, too. 

“Hunk said to call if we needed him…” she says, a little later.

Lance is still sniffling, face buried in her shoulder. His just nods. Pidge smiles a little, and reaches for the call panel at the head of the bed. 

Everything may be different now, but they still have each other.


End file.
